It has been roughly ten years since I built a new PC. This spring, I decided it was time to upgrade. Tech is constantly evolving so I was a bit nervous that too much has changed. Luckily, I was wrong. When I put my new components into my PC, there wasn’t much difference from when I built years ago. One thing has changed though — the performance speed of these machines.
One of the top reasons for overall speed improvement is the Solid State Hard Drive (SSD). It isn’t a magical improvement — it depends on what you’re trying to speed up (see this article from PC Gamer for an overview), but if you still aren’t using one, you should heavily consider the switch. The Samsung 870 QVO may be an excellent place to start.
I have two hard drives in my machine: a standard HDD (WD Blue), and the Samsung mentioned above SSD. I decided to clone my HDD to the new Samsung 870 to get an idea of speed differences in gaming/booting up my machine. The difference is night and day. The Samsung 870 QVO boots Windows 10 in roughly 15s, whereas my HDD takes over one minute. I’ve always heard of the difference, but seeing it happen in real time is impressive.
Long Windows load times are a thing of the past with the Samsung SSD, but what about gaming load times? Well, the answer is the same — there just isn’t a fair comparison here. Game load times were easily cut in half. Now I can access games quicker than ever before. I can’t imagine waiting for Flight Simulator (this game has crazy load times even on SSD) to load on my old HDD. I really don’t have the patience for it. Thankfully, with this SSD, I don’t wait nearly as long.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. After doing some additional research, the Samsung 870 QVO SSD boasts read speeds (how fast data is accessed) of up to 560 MBps (Megabytes per second), and write speeds (the speed that new data is copied onto the drive) of around 530 MBps. This is about three times faster than standard hard drives.
I ran the Samsung Magician tool (an optional software), and the drive recorded read and write speeds even higher than advertised (564 MBps and 536MBps). While this isn’t a vast difference, it’s a pleasant surprise.
Is the Samsung 870 QVO all sunshine and rainbows? If you’re looking for a speed boost, then yes. Keep in mind that any hard drive can still fail, and I always encourage people to back up essential files in the cloud and/or on DVD or Blu-Ray. The 870 QVO, like all SSDs, has a limited number of times it can write to the drive. The speed boost alone makes it a worthwhile upgrade. I can still get a standard HDD with more space at a lower cost. But after experiencing the difference, I think I’ll stick with Samsung.
